Google exec from Los Altos among top political donors to 2014 midterm candidates

The political donation cycle never ends — especially around here. A just-released study from Nerd Wallet says San Francisco and San Jose are the No. 3 and No. 4 markets for campaign contributions per capital to federal candidates parties and Political Action Committees so far in the 2014 midterm cycle. As Comrade Marinucci reported long ago, we’ve long known that the Bay Area/Silicon Valley is drubbing New York who is giving more sweepstakes.

Among the top individual donors nationally (No. 12 to be exact) is Matthew Cutts of Los Altos, whose $205,000 donation goosed the San Jose market up the list. All of the cash went to unaffiliated candidates. Hmmmm, interesting. The Nerds tell me that Matthew “is the head of Google’s Webspam team.”

We’ll now pause for a moment to note that someone who is an ace at filtering spam is contributing to politicians, our culture’s ultimate spammers.

UPDATE:
Matt Cutts responded to us, clarifying that the report that his donations did not go to unaffiliated candidates:

In fact, the vast majority of my donations have been to organizations that seek to reduce money in elections, bring transparency to politics, and fight corruption in politics: groups like Larry Lessig’s Change Congress, the Sunlight Foundation, MAPLight, United Republic, CounterPAC, and Friends of Democracy.

So when the article says “All of their cash went to unaffiliated candidates,” that’s not accurate. It went to organizations that promote transparency, citizen-funded elections, and attempts to tackle corruption in the political process.

Let’s look at this in chart form:

Here’s what the Nerds had to say about No. 3 on the list, San Francisco:

The predominantly liberal San Francisco area contributed $3.49 per capita to candidates in the 2014 election for a total contribution of $15.6 million. Of the donations that directly reached one of the two major parties, 78 percent went to Democrats—the highest left-wing ratio of all 10 places on this list. One of the biggest political givers from San Francisco is Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesfore.com. Benioff and his wife Lynne have contributed $172,600 to this year’s elections, 82 percent of which went to Democrats, 16 percent to Republicans and 3 percent to others.

And here’s the Nerd take on San Jose:

Not too far behind the San Francisco area is San Jose. Similar to its California counterpart, the San Jose metro directed nearly 75 percent of all of its party-specific contributions towards Democrats. Falling under this area is Google, headquartered in Mountain View. The multi-billion dollar company is the 30th biggest overall contributor this year, giving $993,778 to political parties, 60 percent of which went to Democrats.